Nine Thousand African Women And Children Exploited By Prostitution And Begging Networks

The President of the Algerian Red Crescent (ARC) has hit out against the campaign of denigration carried out, through media outlets, in particular French, against Algeria about an alleged maltreatment suffered by Malians repatriated recently from the country.

In a statement to “Echorouk”, Ms Saïda Benhabylès formally denied the deaths during the recent deportation of three Malian migrants relayed and amplified by certain malevolent media outlets, in particular French.

“There were no forced departures, except for a few Malian migrants who expressed the wish to be repatriated home, in their own country,” she said, while underlining that “Algeria has been deploying tremendous efforts to express its solidarity with hapless African migrants and refugees”.

“We did not wait for the UN’s injunction to duly respect humanitarian rights. Self-help and humanitarian values are a secular tradition, an embedded culture, it is something innate that is part and parcel of the Algerian personality”, she pointed out. 

Affirming that Algeria “is not responsible for the humanitarian tragedies that strike certain countries and that it has a distant vision”, the president of the CRA stated that the “humanitarian militants refuse to play now, the firemen’s’ role”, as she put it.

In this line, Ms Benhabylès drew a parallel between this campaign of denigration against our country in the name of a so-called “humanitarian law” with that carried out during the tragic period of the 1990s under the misguiding slogan “who kills who”.

The ARC President also revealed the overall deportation of 18 thousand and 466 Africans, including nine thousand women and children who were being exploited, she said,  by shadowy begging and prostitution networks in various parts of the country.

On another note, the president of the Algerian Red Crescent reiterated the philosophy of the latter’s action based on the fact that the ARC must constitute the “humanitarian arm of the public authorities and not a burden”.

That is why, moreover, she boasted that the ARC humanitarian organization no longer relies on taxpayers’ money; in other words, it no longer benefits from subsidies, stressing it only relies on the financial contributions of its members and Donors and other sponsors.

Ms Benhabylès outlined two main objectives set for the  ARC, the first of which concerns the homeless with the installation of two commissions, one is responsible for their identification and the second one is entrusted with exploring the solutions to each humanitarian case with, of course, the close collaboration of many institutional partners such as ministries of health, religious affairs, the interior and local assemblies…